[ale] shell accounts

[Les Neste]

I agree with jj.  From a business perspective (I imagine, since I haven't
worked the ISP side of the fence), the risk/reward ratio just doesn't
support it.  For a national-class ISP, they can make their money selling
the same product (dial-up accounts, web hosting, canned and limited
interactivity for web sites) without incurring either the technical risk
(that something will break) or the profit risk (that they won't be able to
make money) of products like shell accounts and full-on database hosting
for database-driven web sites.  

It's hard to give a programmer the freedom to do whatever they want, while
still isolating other users (who are sharing a machine with you) from the
nasty  things you could do if you wanted to as a programmer with a
command-line interface.  For people who really need this kind of power,
Mindspring for example offers colocation, where you essentially have your
own machine and can do whatever you want without bringing down anyone else
in the process.

As another example, Blackstone and Cullen used to offer database hosting to
serve as a back end to database driven web sites.  They found they were
stuck in the unprofitable and risky middle between two better options: on
the one hand, the one-size-fits-all dialup ISP/web hosting account, and, on
the other end, by-the-hour IT services where they'll give you as much
customization as you want while minimizing their risk by charging you by
the hour.  They chose this second approach and (as of last fall) had
discontinued their database hosting accounts.

Seems to me, though, there may be opportunities to serve niche markets for
ISP who think it's worth it to figure out how.  crl has been around for a
long time and they're doing it.


At 02:38 PM 9/24/99 -0400, jj at spiderentertainment.com wrote:
>Not sure about mindspring, but shell account is your regular telnet
>login, mostly via csh, some via bash. You can telnet to the machine, and
>work on it.
>
>Most isp do not offer such thing anymore as it leads to security
>problems, plus an average person does not need a shell account.
>
>Too many buffer overruns !.



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Les Neste
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